The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel in thirteen years, blends menace and luxury. Framed as the traumatic memory of “Bret,” recalled from the vantage of his adult life, it follows a set of privileged high schoolers across two unholy months. At the age of seventeen, Bret is dissembling about his sexuality and trying to come out as a novelist; he and his classmates drift toward graduation, swathed in Gucci and cigarette smoke. Meanwhile, a serial killer, “the Trawler,” has started to prey on local girls, just as a new kid, Robert, arrives at school with an eerily flawless air.
